Heartbeat
by eha1234
Summary: Tom refused to be forgotten. Tom refused to be left aside like a tatty tool, used then cast aside. But how can one hope for freedom when they have no body, no heartbeat and no way out of the paper prison they are left in? Some drabble about the horcrux in the diary. One shot.


**A oneshot of the horcrux in the diary, start to finish.**

* * *

 **Heartbeat**

Tom closed his eyes to a prison of paper.

The agony of the transition had dulled to a dull ache but its presence was still there, perhaps more concerning now that he could no longer pinpoint its existence. Rather than burning through every nerve, it now pressed against his entire being, clouding the corners of his mind. It wasn't just a physical felling (could it even be called such?) either. Tom felt the disconcerting feeling of simple _wrongness_ acutely; as though he had walked into a room having forgotten something.

Empty.

He searched for a sensation he couldn't quite pinpoint and the endless loops of functions his analytical mind pulled him through threatened to tear him apart.

It slowly dawned on his that it was far too quiet. Tom liked the quiet; away from the noisy rabble of people, where he could finally settle on his thoughts. Everything was always too loud, everyone was always too stupid to understand and snatches of peace was bliss. But this silence? This silence was painfully still, without even his own heartbeat for company. Who knew you could miss your own heartbeat?

Time was endless, yet passed in a blur.

He was floating in some plane that was not quite consciousness but not void of thought either. He sat and thought and contemplated, far more deeply than he had before.

Tom… or was he? What was he anyway? A bit of a person?

It was funny, because Tom had never really stopped to consider beforehand what would happen to the bit of soul that ended up shoved in the diary he had selected as his first vessel. He had always imaged it would be a tool to be used; neither intelligent nor conscious. Now, he supposed that idea was a folly one. Diary Tom remembered being Tom. A dull sense of horror running through him like slow treacle, he realised he could never quite be that again.

Alive.

Tom missed the sensation of quill on parchment. He missed the cold halls, his clicking shoes on stone tiles. He missed the dusty scent of books, the warmth of sunlight, the brightness of vision, the thundering of his heart against his chest. Merlin's beard, he almost missed Professor Dippet's squeaking complements, Dumbledore's quiet smugness (alright, maybe he hadn't quite fallen _that_ far, yet).

When would it end? Once upon a time, Tom had wanted to live forever. He supposed the state he was in was endless.

The thought was concerning. Was he condemned to this fate forever?

Death, he supposed, must be similar to this; the endless nothingness that stretched to the oblivion. It was terrifying, yet the terror was dulled by his half existence, and that fact filled him with yet more terror, an endless spiral of burning fear. He couldn't finish like this, not finished at all.

Tom refused to die.

In his trance he was half aware of the other part of him that walked the earth. Every now and then he would get snatches of emotion – like the distant roaring of waves crashing against a sea – but they would be faded and almost invisible. The burning of anger, the leaping of delight, the wobble of uncertainty and the sinking of despair that left him knotting inside when he didn't even have an _inside_ to speak of.

There would be a flash of green imprinted in his closed eyes. Even in this dark place of endless white, where there was no night or day, where he did not sleep, he was kept awake by nightmares of emerald.

Then silence.

If the silence before was disconcerting, then this was agony. There was nothing on the other end of the transmission that never received. Not even a whisper. The open phone line was dead, the other end hanging still in the air without even a burst of static to show they were still connected. Tom wondered if he had died.

For a while, Tom was left in shock. He tried to recall his last real sensation – the leap of glee, the lick of terror against his being (mingled, falling, dying, screaming…) – but the more he tried to think, the more his half existence fought against him, slowed his thoughts and left them on repeat. He wasn't real, he was reminded painfully. Even that reminder was dull.

Over time, he realised that the silence left him time. Before the snatches of reality had left him transfixed on potential life but now, he had time to contemplate and plan.

He realised he could feel the edges of the diary around him. If he pushed hard enough he could sense the shelf he was on, cold and hard underneath him. It was wooden, quite ordinary, and on either side of him were books of equal insignificance. The thought of him being left on such a place left him fuming in anger.

It could not be the other part of him that had left him here.

When he could, Tom imagined coming out the diary. He imagined standing by the dusty tombs of his parchment prison and sneering down at the thing. Whoever had imprisoned him in walls of wood would fall in agony before being silenced by a quick flash of green and then he would destroy the thing that connected him to the muggle world forever.

Diary Tom hated his insignificant existence. For as long as he had known he had hated his weak and pathetic position as one of the countless in an orphanage, tried to distance himself from that painful past. He had dreamed of becoming a great man – a politician perhaps – destroying the world for forgetting he was there; making them fear him so they could never forget again.

There was a shiver of activity from the other end that Tom caught in his more sensitive state.

And there was that despair again, now mixed with frustration and rage. Again green haunted him. Not a curse, Tom realised, but eyes. Emerald and staring up at him with defiance that he couldn't wait to crush. The feeling flickered out like a blown candle before Tom had fully comprehended its existence.

Tom was ready now, more than ever. Even half alive, half aware, full of half thoughts, Tom was waiting for just one chance at freedom. One chance was all he needed.

Tom refused to be forgotten.

When Tom opened his eyes for the first time, half a century had passed since his creation, although he wasn't aware of that fact straightaway. The first thing he saw was a waterfall of fire that tumbled over his pages.

No. It was hair, bright red, and eyes too that were chocolate brown.

Chocolate was luxury. He could remember his brief ecstasy of its sweetness on his tongue, along with the flashing image of green ties and black hats… a sea of silver platters loaded with pies and cakes and little raindrop candy and chocolate. It couldn't be a real memory though, for Tom was certain he hadn't reacted so childishly at the sweet treats the end of year feast, when Tom had dragged his house to the House Cup victory in his first year of Hogwarts.

 _Dear Diary,_

She bit her lips lightly as she wrote those words. She pressed too tightly on her quill, the ink splattering unevenly. Then her eyes widened as those words burned into Tom's presence and disappeared from her sight.

 _Hello,_ Tom replied.

And her heartbeat soared. Tom _felt it_ through his pages, as it _burned_ through him. Those echoing drum beats that he envied with burning passion, the sheer agony of having life so close yet unreachable.

 _What's your name?_

She dipped her quill with far too much haste and another blot of ink passed its way across the page. Tom ignored it and focused instead on the name that followed, curly letters that were cringe worthy, with a circle over the 'i' instead of a dot.

 _Ginny Weasley._

Tom vaguely recalled the surname but he couldn't think from where. To be honest, he could hardly think at all with the taste of freedom sitting so tentatively on his non-existent lips. Of course a plan had already formulated in his mind, one that had been sitting on the edge of his thoughts for all his time of entrapment.

 _Nice to meet you Ginny. My name is Tom Riddle._

Tom refused to end.

Inactivity had left his thoughts a turbulent storm inside the dusty tombs of his diary but left his charisma untouched. Like hands flickering over a well-used spell, the feeling of it familiar despite the years that had spanned in-between; his words flowed with ease. Did his frustration show through his honey combed words? They must have, but the girl _Ginny_ only caught onto them with tighter interest.

 _Tom, are you alright?_

 _Tom, you must tell me what's wrong._

 _Tom, I can't help you if I don't know what the problem is!_

The name bugged him. It was the name that haunted him from his filthy muggle of a father's gravestone, the names that echoed out to him across the list of the dead on filthy muggle newspapers, repeated over and over again. He was, would be, would always be, the greatest wizard of all time… not fated to die forgotten, a single name, unknown.

He remembered the relish with which he finally cut ties with his father's side. The flash of green that burned into his retinas, the elated sense of freedom as he wiped clean the taint of his existence. Then why did Tom Riddle still haunt him, in the redness of the blood he no longer had, the reflection of the body he no longer possessed?

Each time the words sliced across his pages, the roaring anger that was neutral state of his being only jumped higher in response. He was cool however, and patient.

 _I'm fine, Ginny._

 _It's just a little frustrating, being stuck in a diary._

 _But you can help me with that_

He imaged destroying Ginny Weasley.

Her brown eyes still as glass and red hair in a halo around her, mingling with blood. Then he would truly be free; without the body he despised, Diary Tom could become whatever he wanted. In some way, he supposed, he must be superior to the other half of him that walked around, free, in sunlight; for Diary Tom was the one who had truly cast aside the taint of their father and become a being of pure magic.

If only the agony of a missing heartbeat could be ignored.

 _How Tom? Tell me!_

Lord Voldemort did not like to be ordered. It was that exact tone of petulance that had gotten a certain rabbit strung up from the rafters. However Diary Tom had little choice regarding his reaction to the little girl's insolence and he was careful to keep his writing steady when he replied.

 _If you could lend me a little of your magic, I could be freed._

A tentative breath followed. The seconds stretch uncomfortably long. Had he pushed too hard, too fast? It wasn't the first time that Tom was close to venting out his frustration at his lack of proper senses; he felt Ginny's presence, her drumming heartbeat and her flowing magic, saw the crimson of her hair as a blur over him, but he couldn't quite pinpoint what she was doing. Finally an answer came, looped scrawl at the bottom of her page.

 _How do I do that?_

Tom's relief was explosive.

He refused to be stuck in a diary forever.

He wasn't particularly surprised when he found out that Tom, the other part of him that had the fortune to walk free when it could have been either of them, had made a name for himself in the Wizarding world. He was however dumbfounded (horrified, even), when he learnt that it was his _defeat_ that was famed, rather than his fated rise to power. By a _baby,_ nonetheless. To be associated with such failure was deeply humiliating and Diary Tom spent a lot of time afterwards pondering what otherworldly circumstance could have brought that about.

However, once the initial shock had dissipated enough for coherent thoughts to be formed – Tom could barely think one thing at a time and even the tiniest flicker of emotion got in the way far too much - he thought it was, from his perspective, a reasonable outcome.

He was the better part of the soul, evidently, for he would never allow himself to be defeated by a _baby._ His other half was incompetent for making the name Lord Voldemort live on forever(now, more than ever) and it was his downfall that allowed Diary Tom to come out to the world where he belong. His predecessor's defeat was a setback but not one that couldn't be fixed with the immortal life he now held.

Tom would become Lord Voldemort.

And he would kill Harry Potter himself.

Days passed. Or they could have been month's years, or maybe even seconds. Yet even as he floated between careful replies of how Harry would surely notice Ginny if she waited long enough, how she was definitely destined to be with him, and periods of semi-existence, Tom was aware of how his thoughts were now less blurred at the edges. They were sharper now and his senses ever more outreaching. He learnt he was in Hogwarts, exactly fifty years after his forced departure (to his mild surprise); a perfect, symbolic timing in his mind.

The Chamber would be opened this year. A hum of satisfaction ran through his at the thought and the fact it was a proper sensation rather than a vague trickle of thought filled him yet more burning intent to leave his paper pages.

Did Ginny notice that little slips in her memory, the time that Tom stole? She must have noticed something quite early on, but it was far, far too late by the time she started worrying.

 _Tom… I think something's wrong._

Tom felt the quivering heartbeat of her fear and he relished it drop like honey. Ginny rattled off her list of ailments; tiredness, cold, how she woke up not remembering what she had done the last few hours, with filthy blood splattered across her hands.

 _It's just a side effect of the exchange. There's nothing to fear._

But even Tom's words stopped being comfort to her and Tom closed his eyes to Ginny's diary entry for the last time before he was thrown down a toilet. The cold was encompassing, agonising. The lack of magic to feed off, it filled Tom with a new dread that perhaps his plan had not worked.

And yet, Tom refused to give up.

Tom's eyes opened to candlelight and a new handwriting that was, this time, a heavy scrawl that informed Tom that it was probably a boy this time that wrote in his pages.

 _My name is Harry Potter._

Tom almost… almost, forgot how to conceal his shock.

He almost didn't believe it. But those eyes that looked down on him were agonisingly familiar. Memories pushed at his parchment pages – of green and red that mingled together to form the image of a woman who had thrown her arms wide in front of his target… Those green eyes, full of desperation and the defiance that he had failed to catch; the plan that flickered in the corners of emerald flames.

Then green again, green as he was pushed out of another body. Green eyes that hung onto defiance as they kept his prize from his rightful gasp.

So this was his arch enemy, _Harry Potter._

It must be fate indeed that pushed his luck ever onwards, for this was a development that even he couldn't have orchestrated better. Here was his enemy in grasping distance, his heartbeat a relish to be so close to, so much so that Tom would already taste the victory of stilling it.

For Tom now, it did not matter what mysterious power this boy had. Tom would crush him, like he had crushed every opposition so far that dared to be in his way. It did not matter that the boy most likely couldn't remember the day he defeated the name of Lord Voldemort. Tom couldn't allow the memory of his failures to live on, just like he had refused to let the filth of his bloodlines taint him.

 _Hello Harry Potter, my name is Tom Riddle._

Tom refused to lose.

Diary Tom had never felt annoyance so strongly, burning through every portion of his being and roaring in his thoughts, when he realised that stupid girl had stolen him back. However he could use this too, so easily, for the connection between them was alive despite the fact the other participant had long stopped being a willing one. Tom used every bit of new found strength he had to drag Ginny's cooperating body to the Chamber and rip the magic out of her.

It was with an instant of gleeful satisfaction as he felt the body that held him go limp and fall to the wet floor with a clank and a loud splatter, crimson hair a halo around her head.

The transition from diary to air was agony but it couldn't dull that triumph that Tom felt through every part of himself. For the first time in a life time, he could _see_ the stone columns of the Chamber of Secrets, the eerily light of it familiar, as it resembled the common room he had called home. He could feel, the cold tang of the air, perhaps not strongly but the feeling was far more pronounced than the vague wisps of sensation he was used to in the diary. Each splattering droplet of water was echoingly loud in his ears after so many years of silence.

Tom was alive.

Well, not quite. He had yet to siphon off the last of Ginny's being. The diary still clung to him like a dead weight and he looked down at it with intense disgust. It was still a part of him, like an infectious growth that he wished to be rid of, and he dared not touch it in case he was dragged back in. It was an irrational fear. But Tom's terror of silence was too pronounced for logic to ignore.

He heard the clank of human life long, long before Harry Potter's form erupted out of the blackness. Tom heard his pounding footsteps, how his breath was coarse and his heartbeat pounding. A smile graced his lips when he heard Harry's sharp intake of breath as he spotted Ginny's limp body.

Harry Potter was a spindly boy who looked so awkward in his own skin, Tom wondered why he didn't simply just sink into the floor. However, his green eyes, despite the imminent dangers all around him were forward focused and intense.

Perhaps he was just stupid? He was a Gryffindor after all.

A half-blood. An orphan. Same black hair, even.

Sixteen year old Tom Riddle would have laughed at the notion of fate. But Diary Tom had fifty years of coincidences behind him and he was almost tempted to say that it must have been some other power that had brought the two boys together, in the Chamber of Secrets, one final battle to determine the other's survival.

Of course Tom did not even consider losing. Not now when he was so close to freedom, it tugged against his metaphorical heart. His eyes were sharp now, and the prodigy of his time never lost when he was prepared.

What Tom did not expect was for the Gryffindor to be as weak and incompetent as he was.

He refused to die.

Tom was weak too, when taken off guard.

If Tom had a heartbeat it would be soaring as Harry raised the Basilisk fang high into the air above his diary. But Tom did not have a heartbeat, nor enough strength either, to stop the blade from slicing downwards, the paper white arc it traced in the still seconds burning into the retinas that Tom didn't have.

There was a well-known phenomenon of time slowing down, just before the moment of death. A religious man would have said that it was time to contemplate, a spiritual man may have said it was the gateway to a new realm. Tom knew it was the brain's response to danger; the amount of data it processed exploding in search for a way to keep the body alive. Tom didn't have a brain. Tom was a horcrux.

Lord Voldemort was immortal.

Lord Voldemort could not die.

Tom remembered how many years ago, in the darkest nights of winter, he had contemplated how his mother had felt in her last moments. The anger he felt towards her, for leaving him there among the others who did not understand, for abandoning him to a fate that allowed for little greatness in later life, had simmered somewhat. Had she been afraid?

It was then that he realised that it did not really matter what she had felt at death. She had died, because she did not have the power to alter her fate. Tom had known the chances he had were grim. He could go like her and nobody would know, or even care. The black void that stretched out in front of him was so still, so quiet, so empty…

Fear.

Tom had never felt it so abjectly ever again in his life.

He had vowed to be strong, to carve his own path where those before him were too weak to do so. He refused to go like another rat in an endless list of others. He refused to be forgotten, to drift away into the chorus of history like another worthless note.

Tom remembered how many years ago he had discovered he was something more than everybody else and felt something tugging at his heartbeat. Was that hope? That memory had to be wrong; because Diary Tom knew with certainty he had _not_ felt such childish giddiness at being told he was a wizard. But the glory was there and he tasted its bitter aftertaste fresh on his tongue.

Tom remembered chocolate. The first he ever had was on the Hogwarts express, a Slytherin who had offered him a chocolate frog. Oh the sweetness of it across his tongue, the sensation that sat in his stomach afterwards, the stickiness across his throat. How could he not have realised how much he relished the warmth that Hogwarts gave him? The heartbeat that sustained him.

Diary Tom remembered.

Perhaps a second more and he would have realised; what living truly was, rather than the phantom he had chased.

The Basilisk fang slammed into his pages and Tom's world erupted into white hot pain. It carved through him, not just the physical manifestation he had but his very existence. It rammed against his thoughts and tore across his vision. He was drowning in a sea of ink and pain and a piercing shriek rang and rang in his ears, louder and louder until he realised he was listening to himself.

Tom didn't want to go.

Liquid was pouring out of him, or was it light? He was burning inside, freezing. He was breaking down and apart and dissipating.

Tom didn't want to be forgotten.

He opened his eyes, one final time. Locked it onto those green orbs, a plea on his lips. He was met with ice. With a jolt he realised that he recognised those eyes. Those eyes that stared at him across the mirror, whose reflection had stared at him through the eyes of his own father looking at him in fear. Those where his eyes; the eyes of a murderer. The eyes of death, from which Tom had been running all his life.

Tom didn't want to die.

And Tom suddenly understood the feeling of despair of his other part as green eyes looked down on him with triumph and defiance still shimmering on their surface. Fate, he contemplated, was really quite cruel in its choice of endings – to be killed by the same eyes over and over again until Tom understood the meaning of true hopelessness.

The final stab downwards went through all his pages.

There was nothing that Tom could have done.


End file.
